New Holland College course created for culinary scientists

Canada's Smartest Kitchen at Holland College has helped develop a course designed to help people become certified culinary scientists.

Culinary scientists and research chefs bring food products to life — from concept to the grocery store shelf.

While training programs for research chefs teach science to people already trained as chefs, this program will bring in people with a science background, and give them culinary training, such as knife skills or principles of nutrition.

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Emilee Sorrey, the kitchen's marketing and communications co-ordinator, said there is a need for the course because the failure rate for people writing the Certified Culinary Scientist exam is high.

'Training piece missing'

"There was clearly a training piece missing because all of these [culinary scientists] out there on their own, bringing their books home and trying to study on their own and then going and kind of writing the test, really without any proper training, or really able to cement those skills," she said.

Anywhere you see a food company there's probably a [culinary scientist] somewhere involved in the product pipeline.- Emilee Sorrey

The course consists of online training and two five-day face-to-face training sessions at the Culinary Institute of Canada in Charlottetown.

Students can put the time they spend on the course toward their training hours requirement, Sorrey said.

The tuition fee is $8,000.

November courses

The next courses will be offered in November.

"Having this certification helps create better culinary solutions, it increases the product success rate, it decreases the time to market," Sorrey said.

"Anywhere you see a food company there's probably a research chef [or a culinary scientist] somewhere involved in the product pipeline."

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